A London conveyancing lawyer has been implicated in an alleged fifty million pound mortgage scam.  This case marks the latest in a plethora of high profile mortgage and property fraud cases in the last year.

Figures show that mortgage fraud is costing us a whopping seven hundred million pounds a year!

Property, land and other buildings are amongst the most expensive assets people own. Buildings can be sold or mortgaged to get money . This clearly makes them high priority targets for con men.

identity theft is often initiated by the con man by changing the legal owner’s registered addresses at the Land Registry enabling the con man to gain control over the building (up to three addresses may be listed).Even if a fraudulent transfer of a property is proven to be wrongful (which is by no means certain) a loan registered against the house can still be held to be enforceable against the real owner (Barclays v Guy), enabling the secured lender to attach the property for unpaid mortgage payments. In some cases it is possible to get compensation from the land registry, but this can be an arduous and drawn out task.

Nationwide recently merged with and took over the Cheshire Building Society.Conveyancing panels for the Nationwide may be pruned an a result of this Fraud. Earlier this year the Britannia Building Society cut 3700 conveyancing firms off their panel (including Birmingham/London Conveyancing practices) claiming that this was a requirement of their insurers as  a result of exposure to mortgage fraud.

In this latest high profile case, Simon Lawrence, 48, has been charged with conspiracy to obtain a money transfer by deception, after Cheshire Building Society reported him and five others to West Midlands Police.

The group, including London conveyancing solicitor and Birmingham solicitors and a property developer, are accused of buying six properties and transferring them between a network of companies at inflated prices using fake documents.

The group has stacked up an amazing £50,000,000 of unpaid mortgage advances, obtained through identity theft.

At the time of the alleged crimes, Mr Lawrence was a senior player in a conveyancing lawyers firm which carried out conveyancing in London and conveyancing in Hertfordshire. He is no longer working for the Darlingtons, the London Conveyancers.

In related news, Chelsea Building Society admitted to having lost £41,000,000 through mortgage fraud in August, and is currently negotiating a merger with the Yorkshire Building Society.

These days, you need to try more than ever to keep your financial identity safe. Doing all you can to stop identity theft will not only keep your credit safe, but it could save you and your family a lot of headache, since it can take a while for you to restore your finances after the theft. Here are some suggestions that you’ll want to keep in mind when you’re looking to stop identity theft.

Firstly, do not throw any old bills into the trash can outside your home. This is like a treasure chest to an identity thief. All they need is something with your name on it to go on a spending spree. When depositing or withdrawing money at an ATM machine, keep your eyes peeled for any suspicious looking characters who seem to be a little too close behind you. To cut the risk of theft even further, change your PIN number often with numbers that are difficult to guess.

Preventing identity theft is also important when you conduct most of your financial affairs online. identity thieves find new victims as a result of phishing, which is the process of creating fake ads or emails using the logos of trusted financial institutions. When people see a message in their inbox from what they think is their bank, they will respond to the ad by giving their personal information, which gives hackers the tools to open new accounts and make purchases in another person’s name. You should check with your bank or other creditors to find out exactly how an email from the company should look, so that you will not respond to fraudulent ads.

You should also be aware of where you are shopping online. In some cases, identity thieves will use a process called skimming to obtain your personal credit information. This takes places in live stores as well, since skimming involves using a storage device that saves credit card numbers so they can be used for the future. When the company processes your card, the number of the card, as well as your name, the card’s expiration date, and the security code for the card may be recorded, which means that several purchases can be made by the thieves without your authorization.

If you happen to live in a rural area, and use one of those mailboxes with the red flags, it is strongly recommended you get all of your mail sent to a secure address i.e. a post office. A new technique used by identity thieves is “check washing” and what they do is look for any checks that have not been cashed yet, and then carefully replace the receiver’s name with theirs. If you think your identity has been compromised, call the police and file a report. You will find them more sympathetic, and they will likely assign a fraud investigator to look at your case.

identity theft is a growing problem, and many people are worried that they will become victim to this faceless crime, particularly when it comes to internet identity theft. Learn how to protect yourself at identity theft Facts.

There are many ways to expose your identity online, even in ways that seem innocuous.   If you take careful precautions to protect your identity, you can avert possible disaster.  Internet crooks that callously buy and sell identities stolen online populate secret chat rooms on the Internet.  The cost to fix the problem is considerable, and the process can drag on for years until it is fully resolved.  You take careful steps to save money in your business, such as seeking out the best business coupon.   There is no reason not to take similar precautions when you protect your identity on the Internet.

Just as the best in business software coupons are accessible online, so are great strategies for protecting your identity.   Where to begin? 

First piece of advice is to only share what you must.  When you’re filling out Internet forms, pay attention to which boxes are required.   Often they will ask for more information than they need. Usually you can tell the required fields by an accompanying asterisk.

You should make things up, if you can.  If whatever it is you’re registering for is not an ongoing business relationship, there is no reason to give out your actual address.   There are few circumstances where a site would need your birth date – you can always use a false one. 

Be wary of phishing plots.  Rest assured that your bank will not ever request personal information via e-mail.  Never!  Other financial institutions will not either.  There is no reason to ever reveal any personal information in e-mail.  If you do receive such an e-mail, either ignore it or print it out and take it to your local branch to inquire.  Take no chances.

Don’t use sites that cause pop-ups in your browser warning you of safety concerns.  Today’s top browsers often come with security features to warn you in the event you visit a site that could be trouble.

There are many more ways to protect you, and this is just the beginning.    Continue searching online for more tips to protect your identity.

An address is also a good way to look for someone. It is one those things that can be searched easily and has a fairly good success rate. People searches are not similar in nature, they differ based on the material you are using to search. Let us analyze ways that you can use to find someone for free by address and the set backs that this search has.

There are two types of addresses. There is the residential address and the post box addresses. Them being listed numbers means that these addresses are filed in a directory and can be searched easily. Let us start with the post box numbers. Post box addresses can be searched from the official site usps.com. USPS is the issurer of post box numbers and the search option is located on the top left when you access the site.

The reason I am pointing it out is that it so small that it is quite possible to miss it. That is something that you can do if you want to find someone for free by address. Another option is to use public people finder as they also have a list of who owns all the post boxes and how they can be contacted or where they can be found.

Moving on, the other type of address is the residential, fixed or physical address. It is possible to find someone for free using fixed addresses from an online version of the address book finder. Much similar in nature to the post box addresses you can search from the official site or use free search sites.

You can find someone for free by address by going to people lookup. They also have among other directories that you might be able to make use of, a copy of the white pages. Compared to other types of searches this is one is relatively easy, try it and you should be able to trace the person that you are trying to find.

1. SSN Free People Finder
2. Find People Free With Their Social Security Number
3. People Search -SSN

There has been a number of articles written on how you can find people living in Canda Online. We have shared on how you can use limited data to do your search, How to put search engines like Google into good use, How easy it is to simply use free finders like Zabasearch or even to use services that charge you a fee to do a people search like Intelius.

However, we still have more strategies or methods that we haven’t shared as of yet. Reasons being more and more ways of finding people free are being introduced online. This is why I like to keep updating the information about finding people.I guess this is why you need to read beyond this article if you want to stay abreast on matters relating to locating people in your country.

Let me give you an example of what I am talking about here. A couple of years ago the term “online social networking” did not exist…at least for what it means today. It was the emergence of the web 2.0 technology that spear headed the emergence of sites like friendster and Myspace.

If we were to write an article on how to use these social sites last year then we would have to update it this year because there are newer and arguably better social sites that you can use today. For example, Facebook is currently the top site that everyone including Canadians use. There is no fee for joining and making – even searching for your friends online.

You can also use the friend finder tool on the site to find people within a specific country like Canada. Estimates show that the number of people using facebook has increased by three fold since two years ago. According to Google Adplanner there are approximately 13 million unique facebook users per month with approximately 28 millions uniques (tracked through cookies).

You can also use the new comer which is rocking the social media world, twitter to find the person. My research has shown that at the time of writing there are about 2 million people from Canada using the site as members.

Hey, do not overlook the “grandaddy” of social networks…Myspace – it is still as valuable in people search as it was a few years ago. Like Twitter is also receives about 2 million uniques from Canada each and every month although it seems to be on a downward spiral.

Useful reading

1. Find A Person Free Using Email Address
2. Find Someone Free With Email Addres
3. How To Find Someone Free With An Email Address

Are the current ways of finding people online as effective. In this article we review this concept of online people search and we show you how others have used some free strategies to locate people free.

Since most information relating to people is now filed in computers, it is now possible to track someone on the internet using any of the available online records or techniques. For one, the easiest places to go to when looking for anyone is on search engines. These engines uses search bots to find people’s details all over the web and compile them in an index format. All you have to do is simply find one good search engine, enter the person’s details on the search box and within seconds you will get hundreds of results.

One problem with this kind of search is the numerous results that it produces from a single search. This is why we also recommend the easier alternatives i.e. social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter to name just a few. Most people have an account with at least one of the popular sites. If you try searching through the top ones then chances of locating the person will be quite high.

National records databases also offer a great source of information if you are trying to track someone online. Most f the government records are now easily accessible online. You could try and carry out your search through the various available records and see what you come up with. It is advisable for you to have more than just the name of the person you are looking for. That is, if you want to be assured of finding more details using a reverse search.

Whitepages are other alternatives. It’s highly likely that you will encounter the same problem, of running into many people with similar names. You need to find ways of being able to narrow down your search.

As you can see, there are many ways of going about doing this online. You have an unlimited choice when it comes to searching for people online. Get further reviews on the different ideas.

Useful reading

1. Government Record Search
2. Find People With A Name And Birthdate Free
3. Find Someone Free With A Name